Maintaining spirit in collaborative communities: Event atmospheres as participation architecture for affective commoning. 12th International Process Symposium, September 1-4, 2021, Rhodes, Greece.

Abstract

New ways of working in distributed platforms and collaborative communities rely on the ongoing cultivation of a special spirit to facilitate collective action, serendipitous encounters, and knowledge creation. However, depletion of spirit is frequently observed. It results from challenges involved with increasing scale, participatory governance, commodification and care. Compiling six years of ethnographic fieldwork, we examine the role of events to maintain spirit in an open source software community, a network of impact entrepreneurs and a cooperative crowdsourcing platform. Conceptually, we frame spirit as a collection of atmospheres and inquire into its organisation as a process of affective communing. Our study finds three atmospheric qualities - togetherness, mutuality and dissonance - and illustrates how they rhythmically emerge within certain thresholds of collective feeling. Thereby, we expand the notion of ‘architectural control’ in distributed and decentralised organising. Next to its functional dimension as a sociotechnical framework, setting up a tiered participation and nested project structure, it encompasses an aesthetic dimension that holds participants and their bodies in resonance. To sustain spirit as a communal resource, participation architectures need to be equally sensible to processes of mindful communication and embodied imitation, enabling the insertion of difference, novelty and playfulness through periodic dissent and distancing.